Android Apps And Your Photos

Warning: Google Found Another Way To Invade Your Privacy

The explanation "This was designed like a desktop OS" is Google's less-than-forthcoming way of saying "We screwed up."

A couple of days ago The New York Times reported that Apple’s iOS was mistakenly giving access to your photos if you grant an application access to location services. Today, Google has retaliated, saying, “We see your heinous bug and raise!” But today NYT is reporting that Android is less secure in this regard, and stores photos in a central location that’s accessible to any app that wants them. So it takes no user interaction or approval for a developer to grab your images off of your mobile or tablet, regardless of the Android version.Google responded to the revelation by saying that, since Android was designed like a desktop system like Windows or Mac OS X, it built the file system this way — in effect, saying, “It’s not a bug.”

No, it just looks, smells and acts like one. Google said it will consider changing the way pictures are handled in Android, but nothing is officially planned. Android’s seen an over 3,000% rise in malware this year, and the recent shady browser-tracking maneuvers by Google make us think that the FTC’s torchlight will be motivation enough to fix this colossal privacy-risk feature of the operating system.

The explanation “This was designed like a desktop OS” is Google’s less-than-forthcoming way of saying “We screwed up.” Besides, desktop OSes aren’t going to be allowing this type of access without user intervention for much longer. Applications that are downloaded from the App Store in Apple’s forthcoming 10.8 (Mountain Lion) OS cannot initiate something like uploading an image without a user explicitly doing so. It’s called “sandboxing,” and it’s a standard security feature that is implemented in any OS that exposes user info to the internet. You have to give the application permission to step out of its sandbox. Google’s face-saving attempt is misleading, but ironically makes it look worse. It’s like saying, “We didn’t know how modern operating systems work.” Google, meet Mr. Internet. Now hand Mr. Internet your camera and step into the fountain so it can take your photograph.